(The Center Square) – Arizona schools Superintendent Tom Horne is pushing back against Attorney General Kris Mayes as she threatens legal action over the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account vouchers.
Last week, Mayes said she is considering suing Horne regarding a policy change the department made in 2024 that automatically paid out ESA voucher purchases of less than $2,000.
ESA vouchers are a taxpayer-funded program, and the money is administered by the Arizona Department of Education. Under the program, the money that would have paid for the student’s education in a neighborhood school follows the student to a school of the parents’ choice, according to www.azed.gov/esa. That includes home schooling.
Mayes is currently investigating Horne and the department for allegedly mishandling public funds.
These voucher funds allegedly paid for over 200 iPhones, more than 50 smart televisions, numerous gift cards worth up to $500, as well as more than $3 million worth of purchases on Amazon, Costco and Best Buy, according to an investigation by 12 News (KPNX-TV in Mesa).
But Horne told The Center Square this week that Mayes “has no idea what she is talking about when she is criticizing [the department] for alleged waste of money.”
“She’s being outrageous,” the state public schools superintendent said.
He said he implemented a policy called “risk-based auditing,” which audited payments under $2,000 at a later date. Any money over $2,000 was audited, he noted.
Horne said when he took office in 2022, the state’s ESA program had around 11,000 participants. In the three years since then, it has grown to almost 100,000 members.
Even with this increase in participants, Horne said the department had the same number of people working on the ESA program when it was at 11,000 members. He said the lack of work force created a backlog in processing and issuing voucher payments.
The “risk-based auditing” was seen as a way to help reduce the backlog, the superintendent said.
When the department finds improper requests, it has recovered the money, Horne said.
The department has removed over 700 people from the ESA program for improper purchases, he noted.
“We’re very proactive; we get the money back. Nothing is wasted,” Horne said.
On the social media website X, the department said in August it had found potentially $622,000 “for collections due to possible fraud or misuse.”
When the department found alleged fraud cases, Horne said they were sent to Mayes’ office. But he said she did not take any action on them.
He cited three cases in which the department found more than $158,000 in voucher funds had been misused. The cases included $80,000 being spent on technical items like laptops, $64,000 used to buy crystals and $14,000 for vaginal probiotics.
According to the superintendent, the department sends many collection cases to Mayes’ office, but she does not notify him of their progress. Instead of sending cases to Mayes, Horne said the department now sends them to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell. Phoenix is both the county seat and the state capital.
Richie Taylor, the communications director for Mayes, told The Center Square this week that the attorney general’s office “prosecutes crimes based on a reasonable likelihood of conviction. If we have declined to prosecute a case, it is because the referral does not meet our standard for prosecution.”
He added that Mayes’ office has “eight active and ongoing criminal investigations into potential ESA fraud and two pending review.”
“We will continue to investigate and prosecute cases with sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. In the cases referenced by Superintendent Horne, while the spending certainly seems inappropriate, they did not meet the standard for criminal prosecution,” Taylor said.
“Arizonans should be concerned the ESA program has such little guardrails and oversight that items like these and others referenced by Superintendent Horne were ever allowed to be purchased in the first place,” he added.
Besides Mayes, Horne said Gov. Katie Hobbs “created the crisis” by not allowing the department to have “adequate personnel” to audit everything before paying out the ESA vouchers.
Horne said the state budget proposed by the House included more money to hire personnel to handle the ESA program, but added Hobbs told the legislative body to remove the addition. Republicans have a majority in the Legislature but not enough seats to override Hobbs’ vetoes. After compromises between Hobbs, a Democrat, and the Legislature, the $17.6 billion state budget was approved in June with just days left before a government shutdown.
Horne said Hobbs and Mayes, also a Democrat, are among the people “so immersed in ideology that they ignore the needs of the students.”
The governor and attorney general are doing everything they can to interfere with the ESA program, the schools superintendent noted.
“They want education to be a government monopoly rather than competition,” he said.
